Gear linkage adjustment DIY

There's a lot of posts advising gear linkage adjustment to make 360 gear shifts smoother, but I haven't seen any threads on how exactly to do it. Can anybody share any info...?

 

Bump. No gear linkage adjustment experts...?

 

Here is the answer to my own question.

1) The starting point is getting the lever and gearbox to sit in neutral.
2) Adjust the right hand cable (fore and aft movement) to centre the lever in between 3rd and 4th.
3) Adjust the left hand cable (sideways movement) so that the lever sits in the middle, again the centre of the line between 3rd and 4th.

This is the rough adjustment. The key to the gearchange is the relation between the 2 levers on the side of the gearbox, i.e. the length of the cables, during the shift-lever movement. I found that I could disregard the RH cable - just adjust it so that the lever sits in the middle longitudinally. The fine adjustment involves the LH cable and is as follows.

4) Make sure you can select all the gears with the engine off. If not, double check the gbox was in neutral when you started. Then adjust the LH cable until you can select the gears.
5) Road test. See which gears have a problem.
6) Wind out the adjuster of the LH cable by one complete turn. Road test. If worse, wind it back and then another full turn. Road test. If better, keep going in that direction until it doesnt get better. All done.

All the above require the tunnel cover being removed and the gearchange linkage housing/tower unbolted. You need to unclip the adjusters from the gear linkage to turn them, i.e. to adjust the cable length. When road testing, I bolted back the linkage housing and the gate, and left the tunnel cover off.

Note, the LH cable is held on to the linkage by a plastic clip. You can pry that off without unbolting the linkage housing. This means that you can stop by the side of the road, pry off the clip with your thumb-nail, turn the adjuster one turn, put back the clip and re-test.

The RH cable adjusted is held on by a push fit but you need a screw-driver to lever it off. However, as stated above, the RH cable just needs to be set once to centre the lever (fore/aft) in the gate, then you leave it alone.

Hope this helps those with gbox shifting woes...